Did It Really Happen Like That?
How writing the truth helped me believe it and helped my sister heal, too
The weirdest part about writing about my childhood isn’t that it’s hard—though it is. It’s not that it’s emotional or triggering or messy—though it’s all of those things. The most peculiar aspect is that I never know if I'm expressing the truth. Am I recalling events as they truly happened, or have my memories been shaped and distorted by time? The line between reality and perception often blurs, leaving me questioning the authenticity of my narrative.
It's not that I'm attempting to embellish the truth. My memory—my actual, lived-in, day-in and day-out memory of my childhood—feels muted. The memory appears hazy and lacks clarity in certain areas. Watered down. When I try to summon a moment, it’s like looking through frosted glass. I know what happened, but I don’t feel it like I should. I remember the facts, but the emotional weight of them feels dulled, distant, and sometimes even questionable.
So when I sit down to write about it, I almost always feel like I’m exaggerating.
It seems as though I'm focusing on the negative aspects of the situation. It feels as though I'm creating drama that didn't actually exist. I’ll reread something I’ve written and wonder, Was it really that bad? Am I blowing this out of proportion? Did that moment really happen like that—or am I rewriting it to make a point?
But then my sister reads it.
She reads it and texts me the next morning: “That part about the hallway? The silence before he walked in? I remember it exactly that way.”
Or: “I forgot about that, but yeah. That’s exactly how it felt.”
And in those moments, I feel this strange mix of heartbreak and relief.
I am relieved that I didn't make it up.
However, the realization that she didn't make it up also deeply saddens me. It’s as if the memories we share are both a comfort and a burden, binding us together yet reminding us of the weight of our past. I wonder how many other fragments of our shared history linger in the shadows, waiting to be uncovered in quiet conversations like this one.
Growing up in abuse doesn’t always look the way people think it does. Sometimes it's loud and terrifying, and it's impossible to ignore. But more often—for people like us—it’s ordinary. It’s daily. It’s background noise. It's woven into the structure of your life so tightly, you stop noticing it’s not normal.
My childhood wasn't characterized by one terrifying experience. It was a gradual process. It was a quiet war. It is a collection of small, continuous humiliations and emotional obstacles that you instinctively learn to navigate. It was the embarrassment of unexpectedly receiving a scolding and a slap in the car, followed by entering a family gathering with a false sense of calm. It was the unpredictability—never knowing whether the day would end in laughter or tears. It was the way I learned to shrink, to edit myself in real time, to smooth the edges of my personality so I wouldn’t provoke him.
And because it was so ordinary, my memory of it is confusing. It doesn't feel significant enough to qualify as abuse. It doesn’t feel dramatic enough to warrant healing. It just feels... normal.
It remains unwritten, unspoken, and unfelt until I write it.
Writing reveals hidden truths. It gives weight and shape to things I’ve spent years trying to flatten and forget. It takes a vague ache and gives it a name. It turns “I think it was bad” into This is exactly what happened and it wasn’t okay.
But even then, even after writing, I still question it. That internalized voice—so familiar, so efficient—says, It couldn’t have been that bad. You turned out fine. Everyone has their stuff.
(As if “fine” is the absence of trauma. As if surviving is the same as thriving.)
And that’s where my sister comes in. Her memory, so much clearer than mine in some ways, acts as a mirror. A witness. Her voice gently responds, "No, you are not imagining it." I was there, too.
Her remembering helps me believe in myself. My writing helps her name what she didn’t know she still carried.
We are healing each other in the most unexpected way: through the written word.
Sometimes I think about how we each coped as kids. Despite sharing the same home, each of us developed unique coping strategies. She remembered everything. I forgot what I could. She stayed alert and vigilant. I dissociated and left. She stayed angry. I went numb.
And now, decades later, we’re rebuilding our truth like it’s a shared house burned down long ago. She hands me the foundation: This happened. I rebuild the structure: Here’s what it felt like. We fill in the rooms together, one memory at a time.
Writing isn’t just healing me—it’s creating space for us to say, We weren’t crazy. We were in survival mode.
We didn’t make it up.
We made it through.
There’s a kind of power in being able to write the things that once silenced you. There is a kind of freedom in naming what was once hidden or denied. But even more powerful is knowing that those words don’t disappear into a void. That someone—someone who lived it too—reads them and says, Yes. That’s what it was like. You’re not alone.
I never expected to become the chronicler of our shared past. Writing a manifesto or a memoir was never my goal. I started writing because I needed to get the memories out of my head before they made me doubt my reality any more than I already did.
And now, the words are doing what memory alone never could: they’re drawing a map back to ourselves.
If you're reading this and wondering whether your memories are real, whether your pain is valid, or whether it was reallythat bad—this is for you, too.
Memory is tricky. This is especially true if you’ve spent years being told your memory is unreliable, or worse, irrelevant.
But your body remembers.
Your fear remembers.
Your silence remembers.
Your story, regardless of its fragmentation, fuzziness, or hesitation, merits telling.
Write it down. Say it out loud.
And if someone tells you, "I remember it too"—hold on tight.
That’s not just validation.
That’s liberation.
That’s the moment you start to believe your story again.
Thank you, specifically for writing about it, but also for normalizing the doubt about the veracity of memory. It’s my opinion that even when we think we are holding the truth, it is simply an emotionally accurate story. I say this because I have rediscovered the “truth” multiple times about the same stories as I have grown and changed: become wiser, safer. That’s what your sister helps you uncover, a more nuanced or better informed version of the story you have been living, accessible to you only now that you can embrace it.
I have three sisters. I must choose carefully which ones I talk to about which truths. there are places they can follow me, places they can lead me, and places they cannot go. It’s different for each of them. So we add little pieces of reunderstanding as we walk through our lives.
To say this is such a poignant, beautifully written article somehow diminishes the gravity of what you experienced as a child. But please know that you are helping many folks who struggle with the "normalcy" of their abuse, and is a validation to trust their memories and the seriousness of what occurred.